Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind

by H. R. Knickerbocker

When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child, and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up when Lindbergh fled America.

He visited many places on the continent, but the visits to Germany and the Soviet Union were decisive. Here were crystallized the political ideas which had been fermenting within him ever since he felt the thrill that came with the first taste of power over the throngs of Americans gathered to adore him. In Russia he found the object of his political hatred: the poverty, squalor, dirt, inefficiency, and cruelty of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He was treated well by the Bolshevik authorities, who as Russians regarded him as an artist, a genius of the air, a man who, like a great singer, could be considered outside of politics.

His political slate was up to that time blank. The Russians often welcome foreign celebrities supposed to be without politics. They gave Harpo Marx a cordial reception. Lindbergh was shown the Red Army, its Air Corps, the aviation factories, and no doubt the Bolsheviks thought he was impressed. A layman traveling through Russia is shocked at the wretched state of the people, their poor clothing, bad food, their brutal overcrowding. You may be sure that this was not the prime object of Lindbergh’s attention. Lindbergh is not interested in human beings. He is interested in machines. In Russia he saw the poorest machine he had ever seen. He observed that the ponderous Bolshevik society operated with an unparalleled waste of man power and with unmatched inefficiency. He saw the Soviet Air factories, and declared he detected the slovenly workmanship which mars all Soviet production. He reviewed portions of the Red Army Air Corps and registered his opinion that most of the planes were obsolete or obsolescent.

In Nazi Germany Lindbergh found the object of his political admiration, even affection, for here at last he had found the perfect machine. Not only was it the antithesis in every material respect of the Soviet Union, a streamlined, chromium-plated, eighteen-jewel model of totalitarian clockwork, compared with the dilapidated Soviet jalopy, but the Nazi machine also promised to banish the Soviet menace from the face of the earth. Lindbergh had in Germany first an aesthetic delight in the efficiency of the machine, then a moral satisfaction in the thought that it would eradicate the blot of Bolshevism.

Finally a personal consideration came to him. The kidnaping and death of his baby could never have happened in Nazi Germany. Common crime was almost unknown in Nazi Germany. He failed to reflect that under the dictators crime is reserved as the monopoly of the State, and that from any normal human standpoint there is more crime committed in Nazi Germany in a year than in America in ten years of its most besotted gangster period, only in Germany it is all committed by the State. Lindbergh loved Germany.

He saw the great Army, then in the last stages of readying itself to spring upon Europe and set out to conquer the world. He saw the great Luftwaffe, and Goering himself “surprised” him by pinning the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with Star on his breast before he could help himself. Lindbergh has not yet divested himself of his Nazi decoration. He laid down his commission because he quarreled with the President of the United States, but he has no quarrel with Hitler.

Lindbergh was so delighted with the whole atmosphere of this perfectly functioning totalitarian machine that he was contemplating making his residence in Berlin, where an American news agency reported that the apartment of a Jew, liquidated in the monster pogrom of November 1938, had been offered him. He stayed long enough to become convinced that the Nazis were the wave, which, whether we liked it or not, would eventually engulf the world. Lindbergh liked it. Here were no democratic gangsterism, corruption, private crime. Here were no Bolshevik slackness, squalor, waste. Here was the New Order, of superior men, like himself, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryans, like himself, of Nordics, like himself. He felt among his own kind.

The Terror, the concentration camps, the murderous persecution of the Jews and political opponents, the suppression of free speech, of the press, of worship, even of thought and conscience! What of it! This was only the scum on the wave of the future, and as for the suppression of the press, that at least was no scum, that was sheer progress. The literal enslavement of a whole population! Well, they like it, don’t they? What of the fact that the entire machine and every part of it was built for war, and for war which if successful in Europe would eventually reach and thrust at the heart of America? Nonsense, the Germans could whip Europe all right, indeed Lindbergh declared his conviction they would, but they intended no harm to America. He knew, because hadn’t they been nice to him, an American? Anyway, he wouldn’t say anything about it in public, but if the truth be known, America could go a long way and do worse than by emulating some of the Nazis’ virtues.

Liberty? Bah, Lindbergh would take order and efficiency any day ahead of liberty and inefficiency. Besides, Lindbergh was one of the class of superior men, superior in talent, ability, and comprehension of what society needs, who in a totalitarian state would enjoy all the freedom he wanted since his ideas would conform with those of the rulers and he would belong to the company of masters of the New Order. He had nothing to fear from a Nazi conquest.

With these thoughts in mind Lindbergh returned first to England and told them they had better give up because the Russians were no good and the Germans knew it, and the Germans were strong enough to conquer all Europe, and the proof was in the air forces he had just inspected. His advice was believed to have had something to do with the disaster of Munich, when Britain and France, convinced their cause was hopeless, lost a war without fighting it. In every point of his argument Lindbergh had agreed with Hitler, and in every point Lindbergh and Hitler were correct, save in one point. They made a mistake about England.